The Woodlanders | Page 4

need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don't know where
'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there if they'd pay me to. Now at Great
Hintock you do see the world a bit."
He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they were
ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.
This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who
knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color
of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by
harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had their rights, he
ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of
some Eastern plain instead of tugging here-- had trodden this road
almost daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made
congruous throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not
drawn through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to
one side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of
ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which
he journeyed-- as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a
Dumpy level.
The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of the
wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a hook to which
the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve
from the horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the axles was a loose
chain, whose only known purpose was to clink as it went. Mrs. Dollery,
having to hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers,
wore, especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown for

modesty's sake, and instead of a bonnet a felt hat tied down with a
handkerchief, to guard against an earache to which she was frequently
subject. In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleaned
with her pocket- handkerchief every market-day before starting.
Looking at the van from the back, the spectator could thus see through
its interior a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw
without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who,
as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in
animated private converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that
their mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the
public eye.
This hour of coming home from market was the happy one, if not the
happiest, of the week for them. Snugly ensconced under the tilt, they
could forget the sorrows of the world without, and survey life and
recapitulate the incidents of the day with placid smiles.
The passengers in the back part formed a group to themselves, and
while the new-comer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in a
confidential chat about him as about other people, which the noise of
the van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollery, sitting forward.
"'Tis Barber Percombe--he that's got the waxen woman in his window
at the top of Abbey Street," said one. "What business can bring him
from his shop out here at this time and not a journeyman hair- cutter,
but a master-barber that's left off his pole because 'tis not genteel!"
They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, though he had
nodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiosity
which he had aroused; and the unrestrained flow of ideas which had
animated the inside of the van before his arrival was checked
thenceforward.
Thus they rode on till they turned into a half-invisible little lane,
whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned in
the dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in a
concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this
self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which

the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet
hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of
those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may
usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than
meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results
in inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less
than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean
are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and
closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber's search. The
coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but the
position of the sequestered little world could still be distinguished by a
few faint